What's Appening: SoundHound could be a great party game

Music lovers will enjoy SoundHound, an app that recognizes music playing around you.

But it’s many other features make it one worth keeping.

If you hear a song over the radio, or a sound system in a store or restaurant, you can tap the app and it will identify the song within 10 seconds. After it does so, it will pull up videos of it as well as give you quick access to the artist’s Facebook account. 

Another neat feature is being able to look at the lyric’s of the song after it has been identified. 

One of the interesting parts of the app is a Google map of Bermuda and it has  album covers of music that was identified by other people on the island. Some of the songs identified included The lady in My Life by Michael Jackson by someone in Paget, Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke by a person in Hamilton Parish, Headphones by Nelly by a resident in St George’s and Candy by Cameo by a user in Sandys. Bermuda residents have used this app dozens of times. You can tap on the album cover and then listen in to that song as well.

SoundHound also has its own Hottest List of songs that are the most popular this week on it.

On Thursday, the top three were Let Her Go by Passenger, Counting Stars by OneRepublic and Timber by Pitbull featuring Ke$ha.

It also lets you sing or hum a song and will bring it up. It didn’t work too well for me. I tried it twice and both times it couldn’t identify what I was singing, which may say more about my singing ability than the app’s promise. 

I tried singing You’ve lost that loving feeling and its closest match was This is me by Camp Rock. It also brought up Shakira’s La Tortura. 

To be fair to the app, I had the Sun’s photo editor Gary Skelton give it a try. Gary’s the lead singer for The Kennel Boys.

He sang four songs and it only managed to get two out of four correct. It was right on Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle and Don Omar’s Danza Kaduro. It didn’t get some older songs by The Beatles and Dion and the Belmonts.

Even though there were more hits than misses, it still was fun trying to see if it could match it up. I can see this feature being used as a party game with great laughs provided by the misses and fists pumped in triumph by people who the app matches correctly the song they just sung.

SoundHound also a search function where you can type in or say an artist’s name or song, and it will bring that up so you can play it. 

The app has a four star rating in the iTunes Store and a 4.5 star rating in the Google Play store. The app is free.